Vivid Alpha 2 ready, so time to work towards Beta 1

Thank you to all of you that did any sort of testing or bug work. We need all we can get! In about a month’s time, Beta 1 will be ready for official testing. We can have a similarly smooth sail through testing if you can all get out there and test the daily builds. Report bugs on anything (make sure to subscribe the Lubuntu Packages Team) and work with Lubuntu QA to get your bugs properly triaged.

In fact, we need more triage. As much as possible. All the time. We need bugs reports to be detailed, with clear, repeatable steps. We then need to make sure they’re confirmed and that a Bug Control member (me!) can confirm them. They can set the priority and create an upstream bug report and then officially call the bug triaged. Long story short: if you find a bug that does not say Triaged, In Progress, Fix Commited, or Fix Released, there’s more work to be done.

Without this work, we can do little to guide developers. Right now much of the team is heavily focused on developing LXQt, but that doesn’t mean we can’t stomp out some bigger bugs together. If you’d like to help with the triage, join the Lubuntu Packages Team and Bug Squad. Ask for help. The aforementioned Dave Kokandy has been doing a wonderful job lately, as modest as he is, and deserves big ups for attack the problem so vigorously.

For those of you that don’t feel like doing triage, I encourage you to test (all you need is a virtual machine) and to report some bugs. QA is a friendly team and we’re always happy to help if you need it.

For the rest of you simply trying to figure out where the heck to get Alpha 2, here’s the Release Notes. Make sure you read them before you download. There’s always important information on there.